Atlassian buys its way into HipChat

Atlassian, is adding a real time component to its collaboration software suite with the acquisition of San Francisco-based HipChat.

The Australian software trailblazer would not disclose terms of the deal but HipChat’s three co-founders Pete Curley, Garret Heaton and Chris Rivers will be joining Atlassian to continue to grow and develop the HipChat product and business.

HipChat has around 1,200 customers including Groupon, HubSpot and WIRED. The two year old company has enjoyed explosive growth with its group chat platform which helps teams, or entire companies, to collaborate in real time.

HipChat founder and CEO Pete Curley assured users that pricing, service and products would remain the same.

“A huge reason we decided to join up with Atlassian is that they’re just as pumped as us to see HipChat turn into the instant messaging powerhouse we all dream of (the swanky new San Francisco office with free beer on tap doesn’t hurt). With their help and infrastructure, we can get some help with servers and providing great support to customers while we keep building kickass features,” Curley said on the company blog.

Atlassian was drawn to the product as they used it internally and it fulfils a gap in their product portfolio as none of its tools have a real-time component.

“Connecting and sharing ideas in real-time helps teams move faster, and HipChat does this better than any other product I’ve used. Its use absolutely exploded at Atlassian, demonstrating the viral adoption potential of a modern communication system for teams,” said Mike Cannon-Brookes, CEO and co-founder of Atlassian.

Atlassian, has been making discrete acquisitions on an annual basis buy may be gaining pace. Last October it acquired SourceTree, a Mac client for Git and Mercurial distributed version control systems and Subversion source control and a year before that acquired Bitbucket.org, the premier provider of hosted code collaboration services for the Mercurial distributed version control system (DVCS). ®